


please, please, please, let me...

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Drunken Confessions, M/M, Stop and go romance, Too much emotional honesty for two grown men, making out in your childhood bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 00:11:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5070334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“But Yusuf was in freefall.”</p><p>“I might have set off some charges in the elevator shaft.” </p><p>Eames grins at him. “Have a drink with me, Arthur. Have two drinks with me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	please, please, please, let me...

**Author's Note:**

> This is shameless. Boys talk too openly about their feelings and their insecurities and their fathers. I just needed a pick me up. Come [tumbl](http://www.katiewont.tumblr.com) with me if you get bored.

After the plane lands in Los Angeles, with Dom safely on his way home and Saito off to do something obscenely extravagant, probably, like purchase a beach in celebration and relax on it with twenty or thirty of his closest young nubile virgin friends while drinking scotches older than they are, Eames corners Arthur. There is something he desperately wanted to know.

“How,” he says, mouth clicking when he opens it from the long period of disuse, “did you create a kick?”

Arthur’s mouth curls up, a little rueful. “I stacked you up in the elevator.”

“But Yusuf was in freefall,” Eames frowns.

“I might have set off some charges in the elevator shaft.”

Eames grins at him. “Have a drink with me, Arthur. Have two drinks with me.”

Arthur looks down at the cart he had for his luggage, and the lone bag it carries. Arthur is not an unintellegent man, and Eames can see his mind turning over. “I can’t,” he says, and to his credit, he looked genuinely sorry, “I’m going to make sure Ariadne gets back to France.”

“Alright,” Eames says, taking a step back.

“And then,” Arthur goes on, “I am going to go stay with Dom, make sure he’s okay, see the kids. And then—”

“Understood,” Eames cuts him off, feeling like Arthur is adding insult to injury now. “You could have just said no.”

“And then,” Arthur repeats, “maybe you’d still like to have that drink. Both of those drinks. It’s been a hell of a year, Eames.”

Eames is wrong-footed. “You can tell me all about it,” he says.

“Two weeks?” Arthur asks.

Eames takes his hand. “It’s a date.”

Arthur, always calm in a firefight, goes red at the tips of his ears.

*

Eames gets roaringly drunk in Yusuf’s hotel room to celebrate an incredibly well crafted heist. There’s no point in being particularly humble about it. Yusuf is subdued beside him, hand curled around a glass he’s held long enough for the ice to melt and for it to sweat half a dozen rings on the hotel counter.

“Stop being a twat,” Eames says, giving him a clumsy elbow to the temple. “I’m not mad at you for the sedative.”

“Oh,” Yusuf says, sounding pleased.

“Don’t do it again, mind,” Eames says. “I’ve gone complacent with you in charge of chemistry.”

*

He meets Arthur in upstate New York, at an address he sends encoded in a text that it takes Eames four tries and a little bit of Google magic to get through. It is more rural than he’d have ever guessed. He tells Arthur as much.

“I like it,” Arthur says, simply. Arthur is wearing a beanie.

“It seems quiet,” Eames observes.

“Only you could make that into a criticism,” Arthur says. There is the shadow of a dimple creasing one side of his face.

What he means to say is _it seems like underground vaults of very, very old money_. It seems like the kind of place he’d scope for a mark if he was feeling up for a massive challenge, because fooling new money is easy, but he only makes small talk with WASPs with dusty pedigrees when he’s bored and prepared for possible failure.

“I haven’t had a chance to spend a few days with my parents in a while.”

It’s not that Eames doubted that Arthur has parents, but Arthur, in a beanie and casually mentioning the fact that _he has parents_ … Arthur had been outside when Eames showed up, parking crookedly in the long driveway in his rented Audi. Eames looks sharply at the house up the drive.

“No,” he says, sounding a little scandalized.

“Yeah,” Arthur says. His mouth curls around a loose grin.

“This is the best day,” Eames says in a reverent voice.

*

They don’t take Eames’ rental. Arthur nods at another car, further up the driveway. Arthur presses on the fob in his hand and his gorgeous machine gives a chirp. Eames’ dick gives a little surprised jump.

Arthur systematically refuses to let Eames drive, with a sardonic little grin.

“Please,” Eames says, half-teasing.

“You don’t even know where we’re going,” Arthur tells him, and guns it. Arthur is wearing a sweater, artistically rumpled and clearly expensive. He looks like a Ralph Lauren advert.

“No,” Eames concedes. “I don’t.”

The place Arthur takes him is somewhere between a bar and a country club.

He asks him before Eames even has a drink in his hand, “So what’s next for you?”

Eames accepts his glass from the bartender with a nod. “You know,” he says, beginning to sprawl, “same old.”

“I always got the impression that there was no _same old_ for you,” Arthur says. In his hand, he has a short glass, whisky over ice, and he swirls it around without looking.

“A man can get bored with anything, love. You should know that.”

Arthur’s lovely face creases downwards. “Not really.” Eames gets the feeling that he’s made a misstep, but he’s never been great at pulling his foot out of his mouth. Arthur goes on before anyone Eames has a chance to mull it over any further. “I’d like a chance, though.”

“No,” Eames says. “Somehow I don’t imagine you would. After a while, even good sex can put a man to sleep.”

Eames means it to be a joke, but Arthur goes quiet, plays with his drink in silence. The bartender comes by and Arthur tips his glass at him and he brings a fresh drink for the both of them. Eames still has a mostly full glass from the first round, so he knocks it back.  

Eames has waited a long time to have a drink with Arthur, and now he’s fucking it up. “So. You came home to roost.”

Arthur’s shoulders unfurl a little bit. “It’s long overdue.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’ve been back to the states a few times since I left with Cobb. Never long enough to let my mom fuss over me the way she wants.”  

Eames makes a distasteful noise.

“No family that wants to fuss over you?”

Eames brushes his hand across the three day growth on his jaw. “I’m a little past the age of fussing, don’t you think?”

Arthur shrugged. “If you say so. No one for you to fuss over?”

“Am I a father, you mean?”

Arthur raises his eyebrows to confirm the question.  

“No,” Eames says.

There had been a time when Eames had thought it possible — likely, even — when he was younger, but he was long divorced now and felt it improbable.

Eames doesn’t want to talk about family, anymore. “Tell me about the hotel level.”

Arthur face illuminates like a 6 PM streetlight as he leans in to Eames’s personal space at the bar to tell him, in great detail and a low, seductive voice. Eames is half-hard by the time Arthur is finished telling him.

“I’m impressed,” Eames says, meaning it.

Arthur ducks his head against the complement. “You shouldn’t be. You were the real ace on that job.”

“We made a good team,” Eames compromises. “I’d do it again with you. And Ari. And Yusuf, now that I’ve warned him it’ll be his balls if he ever pulls a cock move like that again.”

“I notice a suspicious absence from that list,” Arthur says, mouth sly. “Forget someone?”

“Fuck no I didn’t forget,” Eames mutters darkly. Which Arthur is surely aware of, but he looks amused to hear it, so Eames might as well elaborate for his listening pleasure. “He’s not invited.”

At the end of the night, Arthur snags the tab before Eames has a chance to. A little while later, they pull into the driveway, long and dark, and Arthur cuts the engine.

“Well,” Arthur says, hands wrapped a little awkwardly around the steering wheel in the sudden quiet. The neighborhood, if you can call it that with so many acres between where they are and the house on either side, is almost silent, “thanks for coming along tonight.”

Eames, a little incredulous, simply nods. “Yeah, sure.”

“Well,” Arthur says again, and moves out of the car. Eames follows his lead.

“Well,” Eames says, moving towards Arthur. He’s really enjoying Arthur’s clear awkwardness, and a little predatory as Arthur has a moment of clear panic when he approaches.

Eames slides past him effortlessly, towards his own rental car, not smirking until he’s got Arthur completely behind him. “Be seeing you, then.”

“You should stay in town,” Arthur blurts out.

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” Arthur says. “You still owe me a drink.”

“I suppose I do.”  

*

He goes out with Arthur again. He’s known Arthur for years, really, as they both worked the edges of the same community, and them more directly for the past two, something between affected disdain and mutual, drudging respect, and, as Eames has finally had confirmed, a certain level of attraction.

He keeps learning things. Arthur is surprisingly forthcoming. Eames is pretty sure they’re going on dates, but at the end of the each evening, Arthur scrambles from his car and awkwardly leaves him in the driveway before securing Eames’ presence in town for another night. It’s like the fucking Arabian Nights, and Eames is both totally in thrall to see Arthur so clearly wrong-footed and completely puzzled. He decides to let it play out.

At the end of every evening, Arthur resolutely avoids Eames’ gaze while he sits in the front seat of his car (his father’s, Eames suspects) before extricating himself with jerky motions. “See you around,” he says one of the most recent times, as if he and Eames have bumped into each other at the corner store.

Scurrying away from him and into his _parents’ house_. If that one little mystifying detail wasn’t in play, Eames would wait until Arthur made it inside to follow him up and knock on the door.

Eames’ balls are turning blue, and he’s getting himself into the habit of wanking in his hotel loo with embarrassing regularity.

*

He learns more about Arthur. He says, “Tell me about the Stein job,” not expecting Arthur to comply.

“Marcus Stein,” Arthur says, fiddling with a cufflink. “Seemed innocuous enough, it was a tech leak we were trying to trace. Cobb tried to convince him he was the head of his subconscious security team. It went well enough until we found out that the space under the dinner party we had hoped he would fill with associates was, you know, some kind of fucked up deathtrap.” He’s leaned in by this point and lowered his voice. “Swear to God, he put me on a fucking stretch rack while Dom tried to do damage control.”

Eames winces. “Did you get what you came for?”

“Yeah,” Arthur says, shaking his head. “Not until I’d had my disks pulled apart. Ellie Wat was on that job — says she sorted the room in order of likelihood of being who we were looking for, and had to screw eight of them until she found the one.”

“I like her spirit,” Eames says.

*

“My dad’s upset I haven’t come to work under him at the firm,” Arthur says, an hour later.

“You’re a lawyer,” Eames says.

“I haven’t practiced yet,” Arthur says, looking at him from beneath his eyebrows.

“Any intention to?” Eames asks.

“I’m not sure. I mean — eventually, yes. I’d been planning on it the year that, you know. My life got a little derailed.”

That’s the strangest part to Eames. “You know, I’m beginning to suspect you’re telling me the truth.”

“Of course I am,” Arthur says. He’s had a lot to drink tonight, and his posture has relaxed a bit; he has both elbows on the ar and his sleeves misshapenly rolled above that point. “I’m not you.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Eames says, considering. He drags his tongue along the bottom of his uneven teeth, heart picking up speed as he commits: “The first time I was with a bloke, I was at uni.”

Arthur beside him looks like he’s been tapped by someone’s static-charged hands. He sits up, turns his whole head towards Eames. “And I, uh, you know, had this roommate, and the punchline is, he walked in on me and between the two of us on my bed, Fredrick had a lot of money and I did not, exactly, have that, and when my roommate ratted us out, I got kicked out of school for sexual assault. I didn’t get charges pressed, because Fredrick was very keen to move on and finish his degree.”

“Fuck,” Arthur says.

“Yeah,” Eames agrees. It’s an old wound, but it still makes his throat burn with shame. He understands, a little bit, what sort of pressure Fredrick would have been under, at twenty and a likely filler for his father MP seat, but it isn’t enough to keep him from being hurt when he takes a poke at the bruise. He finishes his gimlet.

Arthur reaches out to touch him, pressing fingers hesitantly to the side of his ribs. Eames allows it.

That night, Eames drives back to Arthur’s house — a house where he has parents, which means Arthur has encouraged Eames to stay in his own hometown, let him in in a very real way, even if he doesn’t know what to do with him — and waits for Arthur to extricate himself expediently from his front seat.

“Thank you,” he says, sounding painfully earnest. Eames winces. Arthur’s hardly a nuanced reader of nonverbals, but that’s obvious enough. His face goes opaque like curtains being drawn over the windows.  

“Sorry,” Eames says, lamely.

“No,” Arthur sighs. “I am. Sorry. I think I got the wrong idea about this whole thing.”

Eames doesn’t mean to be a stand-offish arsehole. Arthur is so different from what he’s come to expect from working with him: he’s circuitous and careful and a little shy. Eames is tired of fucking it up .

“You didn’t,” Eames says, and crowds in close. Arthur backs up a little, so his lower back hits the side of his car. Eames thinks he just wants to get himself stabilized, but he moves in slowly, just in case. By the time he’s almost touching Arthur’s lips with his own, Arthur’s mouth is already parted. He touches it with a whisper of pressure, his bottom lip lines up with Arthur’s and slotting his top between Arthur’s. It’s chaste and a little affectionate, and they both let it hover between them.

“Thanks for the drink,” Eames says, quiet and smiling when he pulls back.

Arthur makes a soft noise of loss, on hand light on his bicep. Eames feels like he’s just been given a preview of Arthur, sleep rumpled or post coital. The thought is like a firefly in his bloodstream, warm and private.

Like he has for the past week, Arthur says, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Not getting any more drinks,” Eames huffs.

“Oh,” Arthur says. Eames is still so close to him that his eyes look a little crossed. Eames lifts his hand to touch one of Arthur’s ridiculous eyebrows with his thumb.

“You’re giving me liver failure,” Eames confides. “Next time we can eat, you know, like a proper meal.” Of course, by _proper meal_ , Eames means _proper date_.

“What about tonight,” Arthur blurts out.

“Are you trying to get laid in your _childhood bedroom_?” Eames asks in a reverent, hilarious whisper. “Because it’s been a while since I had to duck someone’s mum’s frying pan.”

Arthur ducks into his shoulders shyly, but manages to let out a strangled laugh. “Well,” he says. “I don’t know about _get laid_. But,” and here he gives his wide, flat eyebrows a dramatic dance move, “I am actually the sole occupant of his house until my parents come home from their ski trip.”

“You slick bugger,” Eames grouses, thinking of every time Arthur had scurried inside like his mother was pressed to the upstairs window.

*

Arthur’s “ _childhood bedroom_ ” is quite a disappointment to Eames. It is tasteful, navy and cream with dark mahogany furniture, nothing out of place, but the fact that Eames is in it gives it an interesting edge.

Arthur’s house in a small, understated museum of Colonial history, and Eames is pleased that Arthur doesn’t warn him not to steal anything. _Personal growth_ , he thinks fondly as he follows him up, pockets empty.

He gives in and kisses him soundly, there, standing on the carpet, and hand at his neck. Eames is sweet with him but a little hungry, and he kisses him until Arthur is chest to chest with him, hand bunched in the rucked-up tail of Eames’ shirt. Eames pulls back and Arthur’s mouth follows.

It doesn’t take too long before Eames’ hands versus Arthur’s hair results in Arthur looking like a mess. A gorgeous mess. Arthur’s bed is made, and Eames does his level best to get Arthur onto it, but Arthur gets to where his knees backed up against it and doesn’t budge.

“Alright?” Eames asks.

“Yeah,” Arthur says, pulling him back in. Eames wedges a knee between his legs, uses his hips to reel him closer until Arthur is practically riding his thigh. “Oh,” Arthur says, around the edge of a moan as he sinks down.

Eames’ blood is so hot, quick at his temples and his groin, and he finally succeeds in pinning Arthur, who promptly rolls away from him.

Eames flops onto his back, putting Arthur who is sitting up and trying to look away, squarely in his line of sight. “What is it you want here?”

Arthur mumbles into his hands.

“I’ll go,” Eames says, hoping to coax some clarity out of Arthur, but he’s not going to hold his breath — historically, Arthur blurts nothing in haste. Eames leans over to kiss the top of Arthur’s head.

Today must be his lucky day. Eames suspects a week-long session of binge drinking is to blame. “I want,” Arthur says, intelligibly, and then continues on, looking volume with every phoneme.

Eames grips Arthur under the chin. “What do you want.”

“You,” Arthur says.

“I’m here,” Eames says, calm. “And I’m the one who put myself here. I’ve been here all week.”

“A man can get bored of anything,” Arthur says.

“What the fuck, Arthur,” Eames balks, dropping his hand from Arthur’s face. “What are you afraid of, here? What are you doing?” Eames knows, feeling anger well up inside of him that it sounds more like a demand than any sort of question.

Arthur stays silent, his fingers still against the cloth of his duvet. Eames wants to smash something. 

Eames makes a punched-out sound. He’s not a forger for nothing. People are hardly oblique, and not that he’s had a moment for Arthur’s words to land, he’s got a pretty good guess. “We’re not starting something because you’re already waiting for me to get bored of it. Yes or no.”

“Yes,” Arthur grits.

“Stupid,” Eames says. “You’re not that stupid.”

“Apparently I am,” Arthur says.

Eames moves into his space. He’d thought it earlier, but now it comes flooding back with the confirmation. Arthur fucking _Arabian Nights’ed_ him. “And this past week has been...”

“I was just trying to buy some time, alright,” Arthur chokes out. He’s clearly humiliated, cheeks blotchy. Eames’ chest gives a rolling lurch.

“Well, that’s that sorted,” he says, and puts his hands on Arthur’s shoulders. “Maybe I should have accounted for, you know, your years being on the run leaving you emotionally stunted. I’m here, and that’s because I want to be. And I will keep being here.”

“You can’t say that.”

“Not forever, no,” Eames said, frowning. “But I can say that I’ll give it a real attempt. Arthur, honestly. If I’d only wanted to get into your trousers, don’t you think I would have stopped asking after the, I don’t know, twenty second or twenty third time you weren’t interested?”

“You love a conquest.”

“This is true, but you’ve got everything I want in a conquest, plus you’re brilliant and mean in the best way. Now, if we’re quite done with this disgusting display of feelings,” Eames says, and leans in.  

And waits. “Shall I … retreat?” Eames asks, after a blank slouch of time where nothing happens.

Which is, of course, the exact moment that Arthur leans in to press his mouth against Eames’, there and gone again. “No,” he breathes, and dives in earnestly. Kissing Arthur is nothing unexpected — he has the usual number of lips and a single tongue like all previous romantic encounters, and he’s kissed him already, besides — but Eames still finds himself struck by the fact that finally, _finally_ , he is kissing an Arthur with some kind of clarity of mind, the swirling doubt and confusion he’s been mired in for a week finally coming to settle.

“You said,” Eames says between kisses, “you weren’t keen on getting laid tonight.”

“That was —” Arthur huffs, “before, when I thought I could squeeze one more night out of you.”

“You can have plenty more nights,” Eames assures him.

Arthur’s hands get more and more sure as they go on, getting beneath Eames’ clothing and skimming the vulnerable skin of his ribcage, his hips.

“Oh — ah, shit,” Eames says, as Arthur scratches a blunt fingernail across the skin of his nipple.

“Sensitive?” Arthur wonders, and Eames bites his bottom lip against Arthur’s renewed interest. Arthur moves back to his mouth after a while, leaving one abused, straining nipple behind.

“Have you pictured this before?” Arthur asks against his mouth, hands petting down into the tight space of Eames’ open-fly denims.

“You know I have, darling,” Eames says.

“How?” Arthur demands, pressing his mouth to Eames’ pulse point, warm but without any suction, because they aren’t fucking nineteen anymore.

“We don’t have to do anything out of the ordinary,” Eames frowns, a little distracted by the deluge, but aware of one point of concern he needs to address: “I’m not going to get bored.” He’s so fucking annoyed with himself for even saying it. It’s true: you can get bored of good sex, when good sex is vapid, humorless.

“Okay, but,” Arthur says, planting his elbow against Eames’ pec to leverage himself up, graceless. Eames finds himself completely fucking charmed. “Is there something you’d like right now? Like, it doesn’t have to be the most explicit thing ever, I’m not saying that. Just. You know. What are you hungry for?”

“Well,” Eames says, and grins a little.

*

He ends up with Arthur’s prick in his mouth, lean and lovely, petting a bit at the base while he works to get his own reflexes under control.

Arthur, at the same time has a smooth, rhythmic suction going with his mouth around Eames. Every time Arthur gets into the zone, hot slick mouth sliding and his hand wrapped half affectionate and half filthy around his arse, Eames finds himself making a little noise around Arthur’s dick, after which Arthur seems to be even _more_ eager, intense and smoky and Eames tries to match his pace. The feedback loop is completely delicious.

Eames has harbored this idea for more than a year, because he gets to see Arthur in action often enough that he _knows_ that he thrives under pressure and the demands of multi-tasking. The glory of being right, combined with the glory of Arthur’s delicious mouth while he keeps track of Arthur’s delightful cock, sucking and feeling that mirroring constriction in response, the whole thing is intoxicating.

Eames comes first and Arthur sucks him through it while he himself briefly loses the thread, although he jumps back in as soon as he can open his eyes with a muttered, “Sorry darling.”

He rolls over onto his stomach, still lying parallel to Arthur but no longer holding his body in a twist to keep a proper grip on him. He sucks him down, greedy and relentless until Arthur bucks beneath him, Eames’ strong forearm across his stomach to keep him still, and Arthur palming up and down Eames’ back, saying his name so sure.

Eames stays where he is a while, Arthur’s cock going soft in his mouth.

“We should clean up,” Arthur says, eventually, making no such moves.

“Balderdash,” Eames says. “A little come never hurt anyone.”

“Gross,” Arthur says, but his eyes are fluttering.

Eames lets himself drift in and out for minutes at a time, listening to the soft uneven breathing coming from Arthur, still lying opposite him. Eames gives a lazy grope until he finds what he’s looking for.

“Are you,” Arthur says, sounding sleepy.

“Yes,” Eames confirms. “We are holding hands.”

“Oh,” Arthur says. Eames can hear him smiling.

He thinks, a little amused, that Arthur is going to let them go to sleep in their own bodily fluids, but then after a fifteen minute nap, Arthur bolts upright.

“I might fall asleep in come,” Arthur says, scrambling off the bed, “but not without brushing my teeth. Come on, up.”

And then an Arthurish nighttime routine commences, as Arthur shuffles them both into the bathroom, dealing with sweat and come and then not only brushing but flossing and using his water pick, Eames laughing his arse off the whole while, and then Arthur directs him to sit on the floor while he _changes the fucking sheets_.

By the time Eames gets back into bed, though, he’s glad. The whole thing is warm and lovely, impossibly soft. Arthur arranges himself, on the other side of the bed, but angled nominally in Eames’ direction.

The hand that isn’t tucked flat under his cheek lays next to him, fingers a little splayed.

 _I’m onto you_ , Eames thinks, but only makes him wait a few seconds before reaching out to take it. Arthur’s breathing doesn’t take too long to go deep and rolling.

“Eames,” Arthur says into the dark, in the middle of the night.

Eames moves towards the shores of consciousness. “Dear?” he says, but his sleepy, warm mouth pushes out the wrong vowels.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Arthur asks.

“Sleeping here,” Eames says, flip but not cruel. He spent long enough being unintentionally a dick to Arthur. He wants to be clear now that Arthur can have _tomorrow_ if he wants.

“You should probably be out of here by noon tomorrow, actually. Because my father will be home before three.”

Eames gives his hand a squeeze. “Shh.”

“Shh,” Arthur repeats.

“Getting nailed in your boyhood bedroom has really brought out the child in you, huh.” Eames says. He’s so tired, but there’s something funny about sniping with Arthur here, in the dark, holding hands.

“Stop calling it that,” Arthur urges.

“I’m pretty sure I saw a retainer on the shelf,” Eames points out.

“Enough,” Arthur says.

Eames isn’t sure if Arthur’s amused, so he checks with his free hand; closed eyes, no dimple but his mouth is curved up, a bit. Eames will take it.

“Actually, not yet,” Eames says, and pulls their joined palms onto his own chest, so Arthur is sure to feel the uneven thump of his heart against the back of his hand.


End file.
